Hard drive not working with Z690 Maximus Hero

[Vector Sigma]

Hi,


I have the Z690 Maximus Hero motherboard. I have 9 hard drives.

- Six 8TB SSDs (Samsung 870 QVO)

- Three M.2 drives (250GB Samsung 980 Pro, 2TB 980 Samsung Pro and 8TB Corsair MP400)



I tried to install my 10th drive which, is a 1TB 980 Samsung Pro and I fitted in one of two slots under the PCI slot. However, in doing so, my system doesn't boot to Windows. I get as far as the screen where I am prompted to press the Delete or F2 key to access the BIOS and then it just freezes. I tried the 2nd slot, but same result.

I reset the CMOS by pressing the button behind my computer and checked the boot priority configuration - it is booting from the correct M.2 drive (1TB Samsung 980 Pro) and not the one just installed (250GB Samsung 980 Pro), but same result.

Please find the attached image to see which, slots were used. All other 3 slots are used for the already installed M.2 drives

Please explain how I overcome the problem.

Thank you.

 

[Vector Sigma]

It's not entirely clear - I'm guessing you have at least some of your SSDs in one of the PCIe x16 slots? Is this the existing ones or the new one?

That board has 3 M.2 slots and comes with the Hyper M.2 card to fit 2 SSDs into a PCIe x16 slot I believe. What is your setup?

Hi,

All 6 SSD drives are connected to the SATA ports.

One M.2 is in the slot beneath the CPU and the other two are in the Hyper M.2 card.

 

[Vector Sigma]

As it's not's entirely clear what you're actually doing I'm guessing it's likely to do with the below

From the spec list...
When ROG Hyper M.2 card is installed on PCIEX16(G5)_1 or PCIEX16(G5)_2, Hyper M.2_2 slot will be disabled.

I don't quite understand what this means? There are two more M.2 slots available, do you mean they're both disabled because of the Hyper M.2 card?

 

[Vector Sigma]

If you put the hyper m2 slot in either of the top two pcie slots it will disable the left m2 slot from the pair at the bottom.

Basically if you've put the hyper m2 in either of the top pcie slots and the new m2 card in the left hand slot at the bottom then the new m2 card will not work. It 'should' work if you put the new drive into the right hand slot at the bottom.... but I'm just basing this on the spec page of the motherboard.

I've tried both slots and neither works.

 

[Vector Sigma]

Then you're going to need to give us more info... pictures would be helpful too.

Having said that you're using the board in an incredibly niche way which could be part of the issue.... not many would need the amount of SSD based storage you have.

What information and pictures do you require?

 

[Vector Sigma]

As much that's relevant really, your original post and follow ups have still left a fair bit out... we don't even know where the hyper card is plugged in for example, we're assuming one of the top two slots. We don't know what else is installed such as say a graphics card.

edit:
Seems like you've already posted about this topic....and that's before you added in some extra drives by the looks of it...

Installing my 10th hard drive - bandwidth compromise

Hi, I wanted to get 2nd opinion from the OC community. I have a Z690 system with a 12900k CPU, 3090 GPU, Maximus Z690 (Hero) 64GB of DDR5 RAM and 9 drives. I have six Samsung SSD 870 QVO 8TB (4 of them in Raid 0), one NVMe Samsung SSD 980 PRO 250GB, one NVMe Samsung SSD 980 PRO 2TB and...

forums.overclockers.co.uk

Honestly it sounds like you might have run out of pcie lanes... some tinkering in the bios might change the distribution of the lanes but it will hit the performance of other areas.

 

[Vector Sigma]

It looks like if you want 2 M.2 slots active on the Hyper M.2 card, you have to install it into the third full length PCI-E slot (G4) and enable bifurcation of 4X/4X in the BIOS for this slot. I'm not sure how the manual figures this, because it says elsewhere the slot is only 4 lane.
It appears (chapter 1: page 8) that the other PCI-E slots will only give you 1 M.2 active on the Hyper M.2 card, which also doesn't make sense, because doing so steals 8 from the graphics card?

The other M.2 slots (on the board itself), I think you should be able to use.

If I understand you correctly though, you have 3 M.2 drives and you have 1 placed in the top-most M.2 slot (which is CPU-linked) and then 2 in the Hyper M.2 card? Personally, I would not have done this, I'd have connected all three to the board first and only one on the Hyper M.2 card. Is there a reason you used the Hyper M.2 card first?

Do you have a crappy spare M.2 drive somewhere? It could be that the new drive is just broken.

Hi,

This is way the system was put together for me and I don't have a spare M.2 drive.

So, you're saying, I need to move the ROG Hyper M.2 card up a slot, enable bifurcation in BIOS and then the M.2 slots will be useable?

 

[Vector Sigma]

G4 is the bottom slot, I believe.

Your Hyper M.2 card slots (at least, 1 & 2) already work, do they not? If they do, then I don't think it will help.

Yes, they do.